SF ranks better in transit than LA, worse than Minneapolis

As regular readers of this space know, City Insider loves random rankings of cities, especially since San Francisco is usually at the top of the lists.

Not so in today’s random poll, and since it ranks the 10 best U.S. cities for public transportation — something we San Franciscans like to pride our sustainable, greenhouse gas-reducing selves on — it bruises our fragile ego a bit.

U.S. News and World Report ranks us sixth — sixth! If that’s not bad enough, look at who’s ahead of us. Now, it’s not so bad to finish behind Portland (No.1) since it’s a quaint little place that patterns itself after San Francisco and has good beer and coffee even if it’s covered in moss. Third and fourth places are occupied, respectively, by New York and Boston, two cities with great transit, so we can live with that.

But it’s difficult to accept that teetotaling Salt Lake City (No. 2) finished ahead of us (Guess they don’t have empty malt liquor cans rolling around the bus floors) as did friendly-but-frozen Minneapolis-St. Paul (No. 5). At least we finished ahead of Los Angeles, the car capital of America — but barely. Smogville ranked seventh. Rounding out the top 10 were Honolulu, the largest U.S. metropolis without a rail system (No. 8), and Denver and Austin, which tied for ninth.

In case you’re scratching your head and wondering if the U.S. News needs to invest in a new computer, consider that the rankings factored in per-person spending on transit, the number of safety incidents per million trips and the number of trips taken per person.

Squeaky clean Salt Lake and Minneapolis didn’t rank very high in per-capita ridership — but they were safe. New York and San Francisco, on the other hand, had high rankings for ridership and public spending on transit, but weren’t so safe, according to the magazine. If you’re looking for a dull ride, we’re apparently not the place.